But I've married a deeply sensible person who is extremely good at talking me down from my various ledges, and who takes care of me in a billion ways.

If there's a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.

I've never wanted to chuck my mortgage, drop the kids off at their grandparents' and run gloriously naked in fields of flax.

As with most of my work, I started from the abstract, from research, building an intellectual model that slowly became internalized when the characters came alive. It's fascinating what happens to the model you've so assiduously assembled when characters are allowed to run rampant: things you thought essential are broken and other things are vastly improved.

I'm kind of a control freak. But there are others like me.

Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.

The trouble is that America's become a utopia accessible only to some people. Others get trampled on. Perhaps it's a problem of size. Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist, once gave the ideal number of a given community as 148. That seems about right to me. There's something idealistic about that - in a group of 148 people you can get to know everybody.